Mintradar - Trust, but Verify
- The problem nobody wanted to solve
- Not a page, a watch
- Why it matters
- A tool we have to trust ourselves
- Open, not closed
Cashu mints are only as good as how well someone watches them. So we did it ourselves.
The problem nobody wanted to solve
Cashu promises something Bitcoin itself doesn’t easily give you — real private cash, ephemeral, without a trail. But behind that promise sits a compromise nobody talks about loud enough: you trust the mint. Not the protocol, not the cryptography — a specific server run by someone, about whom you usually know almost nothing. Is it still running? Does it have reserves? Does it support the NUTs your wallet needs? Has it ever answered anyone, or did it just quietly disappear like dozens of others?
These questions got solved ad hoc in the Cashu community — someone asked on Nostr, someone hacked together their own script, information got lost in DMs. What was missing was one shared, verifiable, decentralized view of which mints actually work and can be trusted.
Not a page, a watch
MintRadar isn’t a catalog. It’s a watch that runs even when nobody’s looking. It doesn’t ask mints if they’re okay — it measures it. Probes run against mints across the network, logging HTTP errors (429, 502, 503, 504), tracking DNS failures, and gradually building a Trust Score out of it — a number that isn’t marketing, it’s history.
On top of that came a review system built directly on Nostr protocols (kind:38000 and kind:38172 for mint discovery) — people can rate mints with their own signing key, tied to their profile, with no central database someone could quietly edit. Login also works through a NIP-46 remote signer (Amber, bunker) — no private key ever leaves your device just because you wanted to leave a review.
NUT tracking (Cashu’s protocol extensions) has expanded to 26 different NUTs — so you know exactly what a given mint supports before you trust it with your sats.
Why it matters
This isn’t an academic exercise. Every mint that disappears without warning is somebody’s lost balance. Every gap in discovery is someone who ends up on a mint they should never have used. Decentralization without transparency is just another form of blind trust — with extra steps.
MintRadar is an attempt to put the second half back into “trust, but verify.” Not because we don’t believe in Cashu mints as a concept, but because trust without verification isn’t trust — it’s a gamble.
A tool we have to trust ourselves
A monitoring tool that has holes of its own is worse than no tool at all — that was a red line for us from the start. Code that tracks other people’s trustworthiness has to be trustworthy itself — otherwise it’s just another point of failure with a nicer UI.
Open, not closed
MintRadar runs on public infrastructure, the data is verifiable, the code isn’t a black box. Nobody has to take our word for it — Nostr events can be verified anywhere, the Trust Score can be recomputed, the history is the history.
Cashu needs trust in mints to be something everyone can verify for themselves, not something someone tells them on Twitter. MintRadar is our attempt to build exactly that — not fences around the mints, but a light shining on them.
We didn’t start with a grand plan. We started with a simple question — “how do I actually know this mint is still alive?” — and the answer was to build the tool we’d want to use ourselves. The rest came one probe, one test, one NUT at a time.
Try MintRadar: mintradar.pedani.eu
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